A History of Argentina: From the Spanish Conquest to the Present by Ezequiel Adamovsky is a well-written, narrative-driven overview of Argentina’s national history. It is a welcome addition to accessible academic resources, serving as a primer for English-speaking audiences. Through a critical approach to Argentina’s twists and turns, Adamovsky does not shy away from recounting its darker moments and its occasional moments of brilliance as part of its history.

The book moves chronologically from pre-contact Latin America to 2019, tracing the evolution of a national history over these centuries. Adamovsky centres the theme of violence in the first chapter, using it not only as a heuristic for discussing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and their lands by the Spanish but also as an organising principle of society. By exploring the multifaceted levels of violence in the colonial process, including sexual, racial, slavery and economic violence, the chapter highlights how the colonial period was founded on a violent order. From the earliest indigenous communities to the establishment of colonial society, the story the reader sees shows both the short- and long-term effects of injustice, a world built on extraction, the transfer of resources to Europe and the local hands profiting from these processes.

Chapter two begins with the inevitable collapse of the colonial system and the back-and-forth between Spain and its colonies in the early nineteenth century. By tracing the chaotic course of this independence process, the author shows that the leaven of independent thought, rooted in the revolution, would continue to ferment. The author offers a clear analysis of the different visions of what the country was becoming, shaped by a host of groups and classes with different interests and perspectives. Through the struggle between the Unitarian and Federalist positions and then into the Rosas regime, Adamovsky shows that the people, especially those on the outside, the popular classes, would carry the dreams of independence and liberty throughout the decades, at times more successfully, at other times less so.

In developing the Argentine state, the author presents the mid-nineteenth century as a period of regional conflict and of movement towards national organisation and frames the final union of the warring provinces as the central axis of the third chapter. Throughout, he traces the contested visions of Liberal Republicanism and the emergence of the Argentine ‘we’, using critiques of Sarmiento, Mitre and other intellectuals of the era. It is in this moment that the author’s vision of an ‘Argentine people’ began to emerge in a society divided among urban and landed elites, the gauchos, country workers and a country ever shaped by immigration. Additionally, this chapter shows the importance of European immigration to Argentina’s history, the colonisation of the interior ‘desert’, the genocide of the indigenous peoples and the opening of Argentina to the agro-export model, all occurring through loans and debts from British capital. This marks the beginning of a cycle of foreign debt as a theme which would recur in Argentina’s history. This chapter not only traces the national organisation of the state but also tracks the growth, inequality and changes in broader Argentine society as it entered the twentieth century, as well as the creation of the ‘Argentine identity’ from these disparate groups.

Leaving behind the tumult of the early nineteenth century, chapter four covers a pivotal moment in Argentina’s history, its transition from democracy to military coups, culminating in the first Peronist period. The author traces the beginnings of the democratic process under the Radical governments and the formation of a workers’ coalition, all in light of the international scene being played out at the local level. After the failure of the democratic experience, national-conservative governments took hold in the 1930s, amid the global crisis and the eruption of print culture and mass media. It is in this period that the text seeks to understand the relationship between the lower class and the ‘respectable’ classes in their search for a place in Argentine society. After the military takeover of the 1943 coup, Adamovsky points to the ways in which the plea for class became the central hinge point for later Peronist government policies and, in the end, to its own detriment, as anti-Peronist forces coalesced around a forming ‘middle class’, the military and the church.

Following Peron’s overthrow, the story traces successive military governments, brief moments of democracy, including Peron’s return, and a back to dictatorships that would lead right into the 1980s. By showing how Argentine society had evolved into an economic and political conflict, the author follows resistance groups, guerrilla and political, all within the backdrop of the economic turmoil from the 1950s through the 1980s. The main thread is a society constantly divided by the ever-shifting pendulum of politics and economics in Argentina. This back-and-forth pendulum left Argentina not only with decades of economic instability but also with thousands of dead and disappeared people, the result of the cruel hand of military governments who sought to ‘organise’ Argentina, finally returning to a fragile democracy under Raúl Alfonsín.

The concluding chapter traces the civil and moral decay of the 1980s into a political landscape marked by corruption, extending into the new millennium and to the present. The chapter begins with Raúl Alfonsín and ends with the election of Alberto Fernández, immediately after the Mauricio Macri government. The story the author relates is of the stages of the political system’s collapse from Alfonsín and Menem onward, in which parties became increasingly syncretised, and traditional political identities became fluid and opportunistic. Argentina, as portrayed, is one in which successive governments, for better and worse, made promises to the people yet failed to deliver, leaving the nation in precarious economic and social conditions. No matter how much each government managed to stabilise the nation, the cycle of corruption and civic upheaval seemed to resume.

The epilogue, as a long essay considering ‘five centuries of history’ (300) in Argentina, helps the reader frame aspects of the historian’s approach to telling this story. By outlining the myth of ‘Argentine European whiteness’, the consequences of the nation’s place in the capitalist world system, the role of subaltern groups in politics and the impact of neoliberal policies, it complicates the ways in which Argentina’s narrative has been told both internally and externally. Critically examining the place of economics and the emergence of the Manichean ‘Peronism-Anti Peronism’ as key poles helps the author think about how the political history of the past century has shaped the story of the nation. While the body of the text offers subtle, occasional insights on these key topics, the epilogue distils them into a series of takeaways from the book as a whole.

The text as a whole offers a systematic telling of Argentina’s history, with particular attention to economic and political developments and occasional insights into cultural elements such as literature and music. The arc follows what the author calls ‘progress and setbacks’, a thematic vision that is echoed in each chapter (300). The book overall clearly reflects a bent towards recent trends in telling ‘history from below’, avoiding the overdetermination of focusing solely on the ‘great people of history’ or the nation’s elite, by tracing the evolution of history as it pertains to criollos, Gauchos, Afro-Argentines, Indigenous peoples, women and the working class over time.

One aspect of the book is that it does not include footnotes (except for citations for graphs, maps or data); often, there is no sense of where the author is drawing from in a particular section. The book does not include an introduction that might explain this decision and the vision behind writing. One assumes, then, that this text was envisioned for a broader non-academic audience. At the conclusion of the book, in the ‘Selected Bibliography’ section, it states that the book was compiled using ‘knowledge generated by historians over the course of decades’ and is accompanied by well-crafted bibliographical sources for each chapter (323). With these points in mind, the book is great for undergraduate and non-academic audiences, without the over-reliance on citations, which helps the flow of the reading.

One thing that must be pointed out is that this book is a translation of a Spanish edition published under the same title in 2021, as part of Duke University Press’ series, Latin America in Translation/En Traducción/Em Tradução. The translation by Rebecca Wolpin is expertly done, and the prose is easily readable and maintains a cadence that makes it accessible to diverse audiences, whether academic or general. As a scholar and teacher, I would recommend this book for audiences unfamiliar with Argentina’s national history or for a class focused on Argentine or Latin American history.